My google starting page has 3 blog feeds, 2 of which are maintained for Kit Siang and Jeff Ooi respectively. I thought they have been maintained fairly well until about 2 days ago. Suddenly the updates were less frequent, I feel. It must be their business with campaign activities.

Someone mentioned in an email yesterday, that in over a week since parliament was dissolved for the forthcoming general elections, she has yet to meet a single person who has voiced support for the ruling coalition, BN.

Maybe it is the crowd she hangs out with. Maybe not, because she is a businesswoman running an IT company with a wide ranging contacts. She did say later on, that while she may have little doubt that there would be large swings away from the BN in the urban areas, the rural areas are less predictable. She suggested rural areas electorates are more susceptible to illegal election activities such as money inducements and I couldn’t disagree.

I guess rural electorates, especially malay ones, would be more susceptible to media and pecuniary influences. I wonder though, what the distribution of voters is like, as between urban and rural. Intuitively I would have thought the figures would probably skew towards urban by now. I wonder if that means there would a real chance of the opposition making real inroads this time around. That would pose very interesting potentials scenarios.

I wonder though what this would mean for peace and stability. Would UMNO be bloody minded again and cause disturbances if they were to lose this election? It would be hard to imagine people like Ali Rustam and Khir Toyo peaceably surrendering power to the elected victors.